


Livelong Night

by blue_wonderer



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, References to EoWells being a meanie pants, Spooning, and ended up writing about repercussions of childhood trauma instead, look I started to write a fic about spooning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 17:20:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14383374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_wonderer/pseuds/blue_wonderer
Summary: Barry checks the locks every night. Sometimes multiple times a night. (He doesn't know why. The doors and windows were locked on That Night so many years ago, and they didn't keep him safe then.)Sometimes, on bad nights, Oliver will hold his hand and check the locks with him.





	Livelong Night

There’s a sound. He’s not sure what it is but it’s definitely there. He’s not imagining it. He’s not making it up. There’s something. A shift of air—someone breathing outside the door? A hollow displacement—a footstep? A hand quietly picking up a knife? 

Barry holds his breath. He listens and listens. Blood rushes to his ears and he—he thinks he hears something just past the deafening _thrum-thrum-thrum_ of it but he’s not sure now, _it could be getting closer and I can’t hear_ —

He releases a shaky breath, wincing when it cracks open the stillness of the room. Barry feels heavy and sluggish in the too-soft bed, legs curled up and frozen together. He’s a stone sinking in wet cement and what if something happens, _if something happens I won’t be fast enough to_ — 

Again. He knows it’s there. He knows. At the window. Outside the apartment door. Inside, in the hall, at the bedroom door. 

_No_ , he thinks. _No, I locked the doors. I locked the windows. I checked._

He’s a sinking stone, stupid and slow. Dead weight. He swallows, panicking, rewinding and rewinding his memories and he _knows_ he locked everything, right? Or was he remembering yesterday? No, he and Oliver came in—Oliver had been limping from the latest battle, Barry had been last in the apartment but Oliver had stumbled and—and Barry had helped him sit down and had gone straight to making them sandwiches and then—

Barry uncurls himself, carefully and quietly. He feels a spark, a flash pan of pain from a cramp before his healing whisks it away. He sits up jerkily, stopping and starting like a faulty animatron. His feet hit the carpet and he steps away from the bed, pauses, wonders if there’s a footstep echoing his. 

The window is locked, he checks twice. Three times. He walks to the door and puts an ear against it. 

Nothing. Maybe. Goosebumps rush up his arms. He hunches in on himself. 

He tries again to remember if he locked the doors. He just remembers locking it yesterday. Straight to sandwiches today. 

He looks over his shoulder. Oliver is lying on his side, back facing where Barry had been lying. He’s got all of the covers pulled up to his chin, nothing but a dark shape visible in the dimness of the room to indicate where his head is. 

Barry licks his lips. He’s got to make sure nothing—no _one_ is here. He had heard something. He knows it. He needs to go look, to make sure Oliver—that they’ll be OK. 

Lightning sparks up and down his legs, licks at his skin as his muscles quiver in agonized suspension somewhere between fight and flight. But he doesn't move. He _can't_. He imagines roots growing from his feet and into the floor. He imagines the ligaments in his knees turning to wood. 

“Barry?” 

There are leaves in his mouth. Molasses in his veins. He hears the rustle of sheets but he doesn’t hear Oliver walk up to him. Even half-asleep and in nothing but his underwear, Oliver still moves like a big cat prowling towards his prey. 

Oliver steps beside him, bare chest inches away from Barry’s shoulder. He doesn’t touch Barry, not yet. “Barry. What’s wrong?” 

Something in him creaks and gives away at Oliver’s voice. His shoulders, rigid and straight, slump. His hands are shaking. “I—” Barry whispers, unable to bring himself to make noise even though he knows, he knows he’s safe, Oliver’s safe, the apartment is safe. 

There’s nothing—no one there. There never was. Not tonight, anyway. 

Tears burn at his eyes, heat rushes to his face and he’s glad for the dark. He’s mortified, creeping around his own apartment like he’s a powerless child afraid of the dark and then crying about it. The more he comes back to himself the more frustrated he gets, the smaller he feels, the hotter his eyes burn. He thinks he was making up sounds that weren’t there, making up monsters that never existed. 

(Just a man. Just a man who took everything from Barry, who gave Barry everything. Scooped Barry out of himself and rearranged all of his parts until Barry was shaped to suit his plans. Barry still wonders how much he’s still in Eobard’s shadow, wonders if there are still puppet strings tied to his bones, unseeable and unknowable but maliciously there all the same.)

“Can I touch you?” Oliver asks, voice measured but not coddling. 

“I forgot to lock the door,” Barry confesses. 

A beat. Two. Three. Barry feels Oliver’s mind try to sift through the puzzle pieces. Barry hopes he finds the right one, hopes he shares it with Barry. 

“I remember you locking the door,” he finally says. “You’re really good about that.” 

Barry’s throat tightens. Finding his voice is a herculean effort he only even attempts because it’s Oliver. 

“I don’t remember locking it.” 

Oliver doesn’t argue. Doesn’t insist. He just says, “OK.” And then he says, “Do you want to check it? Together?” 

Barry nods. He sees Oliver reach for the door. 

“Can you… get something? First?”

Oliver pauses but seems to know what he means. He turns away and the cold of the room rushes in to the space he occupied. Barry shivers. He listens to Oliver walk back toward the bed where he turns on the nightstand lamp. He puts on his sleep pants and gets a gun from underneath the bed. Then he comes back to Barry and waits. Barry doesn’t look at him, doesn’t want him to see his face, but he offers up his palm. 

Oliver holds Barry’s hand. He keeps the gun pointed down with the other. Barry opens the bedroom door. 

They check all the windows. They check the door. It’s all locked. 

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Barry says, looking at their apartment door with Oliver patiently standing beside him, still holding his hand. 

“What doesn’t matter?” 

“The lock.” Barry swallows. “I can go through walls. He could go through walls." 

Oliver’s grip tightens but he doesn’t say anything. 

"Our house was locked that night,” he continues. “The lights were on. It wasn’t even that late. M-Mom and Dad were… All of the things that make you safe when you’re little—lights, locks, other people. None of it mattered.” 

“I know.” 

“It doesn’t matter now.” 

Oliver takes a breath to deny it. But he can’t, because it would be half-hollow platitudes. What could he say? That locks could keep out anyone who wanted to hurt them? That wasn’t true, even for normal humans. That he and Oliver could stop them? Oliver is a living weapon—scars and muscle sculpted in efficient and lethal machinery. Barry has superpowers. And yet both have experienced more loss in the past few years than ever before. There were times when they couldn’t even hold on to each other. 

So, Oliver only says, “I’m here.” 

Barry squeezes his hand. He keeps his head turned down and away. This night is embarrassing enough without showcasing his tears. 

“Can we check again?” 

“Yes. Come on.”

They walk the apartment together one more time, checking each lock. And then they crawl back in bed. Barry curls back in on himself, knees to his chest, a stupid and slow stone sinking into the mattress. He hears Oliver put up his weapon, hears the click of the lamp switch, the jostle and creak of the sheets and mattress. 

Finally, Oliver wedges an arm around Barry and pulls until Barry’s back is flush against his chest and stomach. Then he works the sheets and covers up around them. Barry shivers. Oliver folds his arm back around him and kisses his shoulder, his neck, his ear. Barry focuses on the sting of Oliver’s stubble on his skin instead of the sting in his eyes. A few tears slip onto his pillow anyway. 

(What good is a healing factor, Barry thinks, if it doesn’t take the tears away.)

“The doors are locked,” Oliver says, maneuvering Barry’s hips until the back of Barry’s legs are against Oliver’s thighs and knees. “We’re safe. We’re together.”

Barry reaches down, laces his fingers with Oliver’s hand. This time he’s the one who says, “I know.” 

“We’re safe,” Oliver repeats, accentuating each word with a dry and warm kiss. He’s holding Barry tight enough to bruise but Barry presses Oliver’s arm even harder around him and wonders if he could get closer still, disappear in Oliver for a while and melt together until all of Barry’s shadows and corners were just _Oliver and Barry_ and not—not anyone else. Not anything else. 

“We’re together. And I love you.” Oliver presses the shape of a smile against the nape of Barry’s neck. “It’s probably a forever-type of love. You’re stuck with me. I’m not going anywhere." 

Barry’s answering smile is small and exasperated, but it’s there. "You can’t promise that. You can’t promise anything. I’m pretty sure there’s a universal law.”

“I can,” Oliver says fiercely, sounding both grave and convicted and completely lacking any bravado. “I can promise that. I told you, it’s a forever-type thing. I don’t think the laws of the universe really has any say.” 

“Well, since we’re defying the laws of the universe,” Barry whispers. “I think this is a forever-type thing for me, too.” 

“Good,” Oliver says and gives him one more kiss against his shoulder. Oliver tries to keep vigil with him, but eventually falls asleep a little before dawn. Barry stays awake for a long time. He thinks about locks and how they don’t mean anything. He thinks about how Oliver’s arm around him means something more than the universe. 

**end**

**Author's Note:**

> @wonderingtheblue on tumblr
> 
> Kudos/comments are welcomed. More than welcomed. They are framed and put up on my wall. ♥︎


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